I say when this is over.
His hand wraps around the base of my neck, twining in my loose strands. I shiver and he tightens his hold. God, he’s a good kisser. Of course he is. There is nothing Lucas Thatcher doesn’t excel at and I find myself appreciating just how adept he is at mouth-to-mouth combat.
Too good. He tilts my head. Grips my neck. Presses. Deepens the kiss until I’m panting. Until a heaviness settles between my legs and I feel him against my stomach. It’s a shocking sensation, a hardness I’d never considered.
He tastes like a guilty pleasure, one that will undoubtedly sour once I’m alone again. We are enemies. Foes. And yet when Lucas takes my waist in his large hands and rolls his hips with mine, I feel like we’re working together to build something. Mutually assured destruction.
“I’ve paged them three times.”
I register Mariah’s voice, but it seems far away, miles at least.
“Really? Let me go see if I can find them.”
Now it’s Dr. McCormick. He’s rounding the corner into the hallway we’ve been using as our weapons testing facility and Lucas leaps back so quickly, I don’t have time to get my footing. I collapse back onto the tile in a heaping pool of desire and useless limbs.
“Daisy? Why are you on the ground? Mariah’s been paging you.”
“She lost a button.”
It’s Lucas who offers the insane explanation.
My mouth is open. Red. Bruised. Most definitely incapable of communication.
Dr. McCormick, shockingly, doesn’t question us. He’s too swamped with patients to consider that every button on my white coat is accounted for and my hair is sticking up in every direction. “All right, well look for it later. You two have patients waiting.”
He turns back and leaves us, and I look up at Lucas, expecting to find him wearing his signature I’m-so-pleased-with-myself smirk.
Instead, his eyes are dark brown pools. Heated.
His breaths are as audible as mine and his brows are knitted together, almost like he’s angry. His lips are a flat line of confusion, and then I think, I kissed those lips.
Oh my dear god.
I kissed Lucas Thatcher.
Did the earth just quake?
He reaches down to help me up and I wish I had thought quicker and stood by myself. I’m not ready for him to touch me, not when I am still coiled like a spring under pressure. He keeps hold of my bicep until I’m steady. I stare down at his muscled forearm, studying the tight grip he has on me. It’s sizzling.
Gently, he brushes a bit of dust off the back of my white coat and then steps back. He looks like he did ten minutes ago. Dr. Thatcher, M.D. Poised. Handsome. Terrible. Me? I am a poor excuse for a human being standing on shaky knees.
“To your earlier question: yes.”
“What?” I ask, my voice raspy.
“I’m the only one,” he says before walking away.
Chapter Eleven
Ever since our little hallway mishap, I’ve started having what we in the medical field call “intrusive thoughts” involving Lucas. They are referred to as such because they are unwelcome, typically of an inappropriate nature, and completely impossible to suppress. The fact that I’m having them about Lucas is especially distressing because, apart from one NyQuil-induced dream I had in eleventh grade, I can honestly say I’ve never thought about Lucas in that way.
I’m eating my lunch locked inside my shoebox of an office while I casually dispatch Lucas’ CV to high-ranking hospitals around Alaska. After I’ve hit send on the fifth submission, I start to digest both my turkey sandwich and Lucas’ motives for kissing me. I know he is trying to get inside my head. What was once a childish chess match has turned into an X-rated game of capture the flag, except our underwear are the flags. I’m seriously considering going commando for a few weeks, but I don’t think that will dull the intrusive thoughts.
Lucas innocently filling a cup of water becomes Lucas turning and drizzling it down the front of my white coat.
Lucas politely bending down to retrieve my dropped pen becomes Lucas on his hands and knees, begging for me.
Medical talk becomes dirty talk. Stethoscopes and blood pressure cuffs become sex toys.
By closing time on Tuesday, I want to tap out. I’ve gone 28 years without so much as a second glance at the dweeb I used to call “Lucas the Mucus”, and in the matter of one morning, he’s rattled me. I need to go home and exorcise whatever demon he’s awoken in me. I need to Amazon Prime some sage and perform an ancient cleansing ritual under a full moon in the center of town. I need to Google how to erase a few hours from someone’s memory so I can go back to the way I was B.K. (Before Kiss).